The British Library Has Made Three Centuries of Copyright-Free Images Available for Download

There's more than a million, and they're all free

The thing about books is that they're not very much good when they're closed and wedged into a shelf. At the same time, no sensible curator would let you put your grubby little mitts on a 250-year-old treasure. So, starting in 2013, the British Library began scanning thousands of books from the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries, and has now made all of the images contained within them free to download (they're all well out of copyright).

The curation is a bit all over the place, but there are some loose categories. In "Cycling," for instance, you can see strange inventions of yore like a bicycle that uses a crankshaft and bevel gears rather than a chain, and another that features oddly asymmetrical wheels. You can also see things like old designs for saddles.

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

"Technology" provides helpful diagrams of early war-making machines, production machinery and scientific inventions:

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

The "Architecture" section is perhaps the densest, and features tons of lovely etchings:

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

The "Highlights" section is good for random browsing. Here you'll find strange furniture and product designs or random stuff, like what people thought sharks used to look like:

..and why you should make yours every morning

As we mentioned in the post on the failed self-making bed, men and women who've been in the military tend to keep the bed-making habit after they've served. Why is that? How, exactly, are they trained to make their beds, and in what manner? To find out we both dug

Architect Katerina Kamprani takes the p*ss out of industrial designers

It's been a few years since architect Katerina Kamprani debuted her "Uncomfortable" product design series, but thankfully the project is ongoing. To refresh your memory, Kamprani "decided to create and design [a line of products] for all the wrong reasons. Vindictive and nasty? Or a helpful study of everyday objects?"

Gilbert Rohde's glass-and-metal 1933 design was way ahead of its time

You all know the George Nelson clock designed for Herman Miller. (If you don't, look at the photo below, then get out of my classroom.) Nelson's 1949 design has become so iconic that if we were playing Industrial Design Pictionary, and you had to make your partner say "Herman Miller

Pedro Mealha's modernist take on the classic German timepiece

When you think of cuckoo clocks, if you think of them at all, you probably don't think of minimalism and style. But London-based industrial designer Pedro Mealha does, and produces some rather modernist variants like his model B83: The bird makes its appearance via the small hole at top right: